love & sickness

Love & Sickness
A two-woman work-in-progress
By Vanessa Huang & Melissa Koh

August 11, 2007
7:30 pm Refreshments
8:00 pm Show

Uptown Body & Fender
401 26th St
Between Broadway & Telegraph
Oakland, CA 94612

Vanessa Huang is a queer Chinese-American artist and community organizer born in 1984 in Berkeley to immigrants from Taipei. She grew up in the Bay and has lived in Providence, Rhode Island, and since 2006, Oakland. Her experimental documentary short, pray ting ai fly, recently premiered in the 2007 Queer Women of Color Film Festival.

Melissa S. Koh is a director, writer, and teacher born and raised in the SF Bay. The other theatre works she has written and performed include How to Love an Asian Woman (Providence, RI), and Flight (Seoul, Korea). Lemonade Girls / Love & Sickness is her third full-length production.

what to the prisoner is the fourth of july?

As today’s the Fourth of July, I wanted to share Hakim’s reflections from prison two years ago on what this day means to her: aligning herself with Frederick Douglass’ speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, she asserts that the legacies of the contradictions of Douglass’ 1852 “are still with us in our growing criminal justice system. In fact, the connections between the slavery of our past and our mass imprisonment practices of today are not discreet once we understand history.” Read the whole piece here.

Also, check out Jeremy Bearer-Friend’s thoughts on the recent media craze re Paris Hilton focusing on how “rich, white people are treated differently by California law enforcement than the rest of us”: while many of us know this and are rightfully outraged, “most commentators called for an expansion of the reach of the jail, rather than questioning the jail itself” — but “the reaction to her story is not to lock up everyone for longer and prevent addicts from accessing treatment. The solution is to shut down [a] system that has devastated communities of color.”

For those of you in the Bay Area, people in women’s prisons, Justice Now, and digital media artist Sharon Daniel are having an art opening at Rock Paper Scissors this Friday. The exhibit is Public Secrets — from Daniel’s artist statement:

There are secrets that are kept from the public and then there are “public secrets” - secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself, like the troubling “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The trick to the public secret is in knowing what not to know. This is the most powerful form of social knowledge. Such shared secrets sustain social and political institutions. The injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are “public secrets.”

The show will be up this whole month. Come check it out and join us for a closing celebration on July 27 from 7-9 pm at 2278 Telegraph Ave in Oakland.

poemas clandestinos

It’s official. My housemates L and T have moved downstairs to one of the studio apartments behind the house. The house feels different already, even with O moving back in (L and T switched with O, who used to live upstairs with us). This means we’ve been growing into familia up in here the last half year! In many ways the six of us upstairs and our downstairs neighbors are all familia, and the switch is minor: we barbecue on the patio together, have house parties together, are starting to garden in the front and side yard together, and split the Internet.

One noticable difference of habit, aside from seeing O instead of L and T when I get home, is the (dis)appearance of certain books and reading materials in the smaller of our two bathrooms, which acts as a mini library of sorts. Here, the six of us share pieces of ourselves with one another (I’ve been on-and-off perusing El Libro del Origen de Las Palabras, The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need, Instead of Prisons, Charlotte Ryan’s Prime Time Activism, and proceso magazine). Since L and T’s move out and O’s move back this weekend, the Spanish language lit L used to leave (was perusing Poemas Clandestinos and a children’s picture book on La Declaracion Universal de Los Derechos Humanos) have been replaced by Kitchen Sink magazine issues 11, 12, and 13, and an issue of Adbusters magazine.

I didn’t know about Roque Dalton before Poemas Clandestinos, and even then had but read a few of his poems. It wasn’t until going through my emails today that I stumbled upon two writings posted on CounterPunch today, both in response to The Nation publishing work by Dalton’s assassin. So, linked here to share with you: Nina Serrano’s memories of Dalton and Jack Hirschman, who translated Poemas Clandestinos into English, calling out The Nation.